Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum

Greenville's museum along Interstate Thirty weaves two stories together: cotton and courage. Hunt County was once one of the great cotton-producing counties of Texas, and Greenville's inland cotton compress set world records in nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve for volume handled. Audie Murphy ties the two threads: born into a Hunt County sharecropper family in nineteen twenty-five, Murphy picked cotton as a boy and worked in Greenville before enlisting in the Army in World War Two.

He became the most decorated American combat soldier of the war, earning the Medal of Honor for single-handedly holding off a German company at the Colmar Pocket in France in January of nineteen forty-five. After the war he became a Hollywood actor. The museum, established in nineteen eighty-seven, honors both the agricultural economy that shaped the region and the sharecropper's son it produced.